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1. Spanish Heritage Language Maintenance: Its Legacy and Its Future
- Georgetown University Press
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C H A P T E R 1 Spanish Heritage Language Maintenance ITS LEGACY AND ITS FUTURE Susana V. Rivera-Mills, Oregon State University T HERE IS LITTLE DOUBT that the number of Latinos in the United States is on the rise, and with them the Spanish language. In research released in 2010 by the economist José Luis Garcı́a Delgado, the Spanish language is second, behind English, in the number of US speakers. Delgado states that, in the United States, Spanish is rapidly becoming ‘‘a cultural product very much valued by second and third generations of Hispanics, well educated, and wishing to remain faithful to their roots and the language’’ (Garcı́a Delgado 2010, 178). And this phenomenon is not exclusive to the United States; with 350 million total speakers , Spanish is the third most widely spoken language in the world, behind Mandarin and Hindi. Even English, with 340 million native speakers in the world, takes a back seat to Spanish. In the United States, college students are learning Spanish in large numbers, major book companies are publishing Spanish language editions, and corporate America is increasingly selling itself through Spanish language advertisements and Spanish programming, such as CNN en Español, CBS Telenoticias, Univisio ́n, and Telemundo for both US and Latin American Spanish-speaking audiences . In addition, immigration and a relatively high birthrate continue to lead to increasing numbers of Spanish speakers in all US regions. If we were to stop with these burgeoning numbers, it would seem that all is well with Spanish in the United States; however, the case is not that simple. The Spanish language has had a long and important journey, encompassing more than four centuries of US history. It is true that in this twenty-first century the number of Latinos and Spanish speakers continues to increase each year. 21 22 SUSANA V. RIVERA-MILLS However, the number of Latinos that do not speak their heritage language also continues to increase (for a detailed review of the status of Spanish, see Veltman 1988, 1990). The complexity of this tension between Spanish heritage language maintenance and shift/loss to English forms the core of this chapter, which thus focuses on three general topics: a historical account of the research surrounding Spanish heritage language maintenance and the shift to English; the current state of this area of research in relation to education and the role it plays in the maintenance of Spanish as a heritage language; and a look at the future of this research, including innovative educational models that both promote Spanish heritage language maintenance and also can help us to better understand the variables in the process of language maintenance and shift. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Studies of the various issues regarding Spanish language maintenance and shift have been present since the late nineteenth century in the form of either newspaper columns and popular magazine articles (Bourke 1896) or academic dissertations and formal scholarship (Espinosa 1909; Gray 1912). Much of this initial research focused on the maintenance of Spanish as a native language (Baker 1953), the issues that pertain to linguistic changes (e.g., phonology, morphology, lexicon) (Espinosa 1909, 1911–13), and the displacement of Spanish (Espinosa 1917) by the influence of English as the dominant language. Aurelio Espinosa laid a solid foundation for research on Southwest Spanish (e.g., Espinosa 1909, 1911, 1911–13, 1914–15). His groundbreaking work not only documented varieties of what is now US Spanish but also established new research paradigms in the field of linguistics. Equally important, through his research, he established the value of studying Southwest Spanish. At the time, this variety of Spanish was considered to be corrupt, deficient, a language of the poor and uneducated, and not worthy of serious scientific study (Bills and Vigil 2008; Lipski 2008; Morrill 1918). However, this view soon changed and other scholars were motivated to build on Espinosa’s solid foundation. Since Espinosa’s initial studies, the topic of Spanish language use in the southwestern region of the United States has expanded to include issues surrounding Spanish language maintenance and the shift to English well beyond this region’s geographical borders. In addition, this research has promoted the recognition of a new emerging identity in the Spanish of the United States. No longer was the focus of study solely on linguistic variations or the maintenance of Spanish as a native language; additional dimensions were introduced in the 1960s and continued into the 1970s as more scholars focused...